How do I fix duplicate meta descriptions and title tags?

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  christopherpell444 · Member · Jun 1, 2015 at 3:32 pm

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  I read that shortening slugs was a good idea so I changed loads of my posts and shortened the urls.

  I’ve since looked at Google webmaster tools and it is showing duplicate meta descriptions and title tags for all the posts I changed. I’m worried this will show as duplicate content because I have two urls for the same post and Google will penalise my site. Is there a way to fix this or should I not worry?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  alexjgustafson · Member · Jun 2, 2015 at 6:57 pm

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  Short URLs are a nice thing, because they help with the human side of getting things shared on the web. But in the future, I wouldn’t recommend changing the slugs after a post has already been published, only when you’re about to publish them.

  That web address is the content’s unique identifier everywhere else on the web, so anyone that’s already linked to the old address isn’t going to get the best experience.

  Similarly, Google will eventually reflect that the old web address no longer exists, so the duplicate content won’t be an issue. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure what that will look like in Webmaster tools. But the search ranking of a non-existing page doesn’t stay high for long.

  Depending on how many slugs you changed, and how often your links have been getting shared, you may consider changing them back to their original ones.

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  christopherpell444 · Member · Jun 2, 2015 at 10:58 pm

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  Thanks for your help. The back links don’t seem to be a problem because I checked them and they all seem to be rerouting to the ‘new’ address. Not sure how this is happening. Maybe WordPress does this automatically?

  If I change it back to the original URL, will this not create a third page?

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  alexjgustafson · Member · Jun 3, 2015 at 1:58 pm

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  Cool, if you redirects are in place then all is well. :)

  If I change it back to the original URL, will this not create a third page?

  A URL is unique to itself, so if you did change it back to the original URL (as long as it’s exactly the same) it couldn’t create a third page. The only reason ‘duplicates’ appear for you now is because there are two URLs.